Comparison with other Language Varieties

Salikoko Mufwene on AAVE and Other Nonstandard Varieties
Shared Features with Other Dialects (Fasold/Patrick)
On talking white and prejudice against Appalachian English speakers
Cajun French analogy
Argument: Does Oakland's policy favor one dialect over another?
African American Formal English, thoughts from linguist Leila Monaghan

Quotes from The Real Ebonics Debate

Ed. by Theresa Perry and Lisa Delpit, Beacon Press, 1998

I will submit that one of the reasons [Ebonics] is a problem, if you will - a controversy - is that you cannot divorce language from its speakers. And if you have a people who have been disenfranchised, are neglected, are rejected, it is very difficult for the society at large to elevate their language. And, thus, when you start to try to make a case with legitimizing Ebonics - a way of communicating by some, although not all African-Americans speak it - you, in effect, are talking aobut legitimizing a group of people. You are talking about bringing them to a status comparable to society at large. And that always a difficult proposition. So, in a certain sense, we cannot talk about Ebonics separate and distinct from the state of African-American people in the United States as a neglected and as an underclass, marginalized, if you will, people. Orlando Taylor

The brutal truth is that the bulk of the white people in America never had any interest in educating Black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the Black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be Black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many Black children that way. James Baldwin

If the truth be told, in the workplace, many of us fine upstanding mainstream professionals who speak Standard English well and who have spent years negotiating the terrain of a white middle-class norm speak Black English to maintain a sense of sanity, a sense of humor, and a sense of self. Beverly Jean Smith